The
The
James Weldon Johnson Institute
James Weldon Johnson Institute
for the
Study of Race and Difference
WINTER 2016
In this Issue
Meet the JWJI Visiting Scholars
Chicago’s Contributions to Black Culture
Biography of Michelle Y. Gordon
2
4
Snapshots in Time Build a Truer Picture of Black Life
Biography of Nikki Brown
5
6
Picking Winners and Losers in the US Criminal Justice System
Biography of Carl Suddler
7
8
Public Dialogue Series on Race and Public Memory
9
Stanley Thangaraj: A Player Both on the Court and in the Halls of Academe
An Interview with the Inaugural Fall 2015 Speaker, Race and Difference Colloquium Series
10
Spring Semester Calendar
12
Dear Friends of the James Weldon Johnson Institute,
I am really excited to be writing you today. This newsletter is
the capstone of a year of resurgence for the institute. Thirteen
months ago, I had the honor of assuming the leadership of
the James Weldon Johnson Institute. My goal has been to
honor the legacy of our founder, the late Rudolph P. Byrd, by
rebuilding the institute into a hub for cutting-edge, interdisciplinary scholarship on race at Emory and beyond. Although
we still have many goals to achieve, I am excited about the
progress we have made in a few short months. From the hiring of our wonderful staff to the selection of a first-rate class
of visiting scholars to the launch of an ambitious programming schedule, we are on our way to achieving our goals.
It is our intent to use every aspect of our institute to support research and public scholarship about relevant, timely
questions related to race and difference. As you read
1
the stories in this newsletter, I
hope you can see our vision in
action. And if you have not had
a chance to meet our visiting
scholars or attend our programs,
I hope that the articles here will
pique your interest and draw
you into further engagement.
Again, thank you so much for your support. We hope you
enjoy our updates.
Sincerely,
Andra Gillespie
Director, James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference
The
James Weldon Johnson Institute
Chicago’s Contributions to Black Culture
By Stacey Jones
The Second City had not one but two cultural
movements that followed the better-known
Harlem Renaissance. Together, the Chicago
Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, which
covered a period roughly spanning the Great
Depression to the mid-1970s, ushered in Chicago’s
preeminence as a center for black culture and art.
Concurrently, they turned the city into a kind of
ground-zero in the lengthy fight to end de facto
segregation in America’s northern cities.
“The Chicago Renaissance identifies a period
and a place—not the only place this was happening within black culture and art—but one
that was important because of its size and black
community,” says JWJI Visiting Scholar Michelle
Gordon. The period from the early 1930s to the
early 1950s “has been a traditionally overlooked
set of decades,” says Gordon. “The narrative of
African American literature was that you had
the Harlem Renaissance and then you didn’t
have much other than Richard Wright and Ralph
Ellison until the 1960s.”
Chicago, however, was a main depot in the vast
movement of blacks from the rural South to the
industrial North, an era now called the Great
Migration. “So suddenly you have this new black
population that is segregated in a large city, with
new encounters with modernity and urban life,
and access suddenly to interesting artistic institutions and cultural endeavors,” Gordon says.
In the Second City’s black artistic renaissance,
Richard Wright—author of Black Boy and Native
Son—and Gwendolyn Brooks—the first African
American to win the Pulitzer Prize—are probably the best-known literary figures. Playwright
Lorraine Hansberry might be considered the
literal and figurative “daughter” of the Chicago
Renaissance, bridging the gap between that cultural period and the Black Arts Movement of
the 1960s and 1970s. Hansberry’s parents were
active in civil rights struggles of their day—“part
of its radical fervor,” says Gordon. Their efforts to
desegregate Chicago housing and neighborhoods
were the genesis of Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in
the Sun. Their fight against restrictive housing
covenants went all the way to the US Supreme
Court and prevailed.
Hansberry sets A Raisin in the Sun in Chicago
“sometime between 1945 and the present.” The
play is first produced on Broadway in 1959,
“when the Southern civil rights movement is
moving in a visible way,” says Gordon. “She is
2
for the
Study of Race and Difference
really trying to demonstrate that this has to be a
national struggle.” Segregation, then, was not only
a Southern problem but also one in the North that
“just wears a different cloak.”
Gordon, who grew up in Marietta, Georgia, graduated from the University of Georgia in 2000,
becoming one of the first students there to earn
its newly minted African American studies major.
She received a master of arts in Afro-American
studies and a PhD in English from the University
of Wisconsin–Madison, and went on to become
assistant professor of English at the University
of Southern California.
As a JWJI visiting scholar, Gordon will continue work on her monograph, Bringing Down
Babylon: The Chicago Renaissance, the Black
Arts Movement, and African American Freedom
Struggles, as well as teach a spring semester course
titled Literature of the New Negro Renaissance
and Black Arts Movement. As part of that course,
she will have her students participate in an online
encyclopedia she plans to develop, which will
bring better awareness of the entirety of the
Black Arts Movement—not just its most famous
members—to the wider public. Emory’s special
collections are providing Gordon with a solid
foundation for this project. She also will work
with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
to help her design the coursework that will help
engage students in the project. She sees her students not only “getting in the Rose Library and
digging into boxes and folders” but also helping
to design and create the encyclopedia’s website.
Universities such as Emory should be especially
interested in the artistic and literary figures who
emerged from the Black Arts Movement, Gordon
says. “Some of these people are foundationally
responsible for building the discipline of black
studies in universities,” she says. For this reason,
she is grateful for the work of the James Weldon
Johnson Institute. “Emory should be congratulated for supporting black studies in all the ways
that it does by not letting these programs rest
in precarious positions—as they so often do in
many institutions.”
3
The
James Weldon Johnson Institute
Biography of Michelle Y. Gordon
Gordon works in the arenas of American literature, black studies, and cultural studies, with particular interests in the literary and cultural labors
of the Left, civil rights history, black women’s
studies, and cultural memory.
including 88 Days in the Mother Lode: Mark
Twain Finds His Voice. She has been awarded
fellowships by the Black Metropolis Research
Consortium and the Advancing Scholarship in
the Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative,
and recently received the University of Southern
California Mellon Mentoring Award for her work
with undergraduate students.
Gordon was among the first students at the
University of Georgia to earn a BA in African
American studies; she then earned her MA in
Afro-American studies and PhD in English from
the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She went
on to serve as assistant professor of English at the
University of Southern California. Her scholarship
on 19th- and 20th-century American literature
and print culture has appeared in essay collections
and journals, including American Quarterly and
African American Review. She also has contributed to several documentary film projects,
4
for the
Study of Race and Difference
Snapshots in Time Build a Truer Picture of Black Life
By Stacey Jones
In large urban centers, the media portrait of
African American life is often a bleak one. Unwed
mothers. Nonexistent fathers. Mugshots—even of
victims. JWJI Visiting Scholar Nikki Brown aims
to show a different picture of African American
life, from civil rights–era Louisiana to post-Katrina New Orleans.
Black Americans have “one image in popular
culture and another in our own communities,”
says Brown, a visiting associate professor of history from the University of New Orleans. Always
interested in photography, she says, “I used the
money I had to buy a nice digital camera, took a
class, and then informally took images of African
American men that ran counter to the representation of black men as criminals.” For this multiyear
project, she interviewed the New Orleans residents
about their lives before and after Katrina.
Although not a native of Louisiana (she hails
from Rochester, New York), Brown sees the
state’s civil rights history as an untapped resource.
Although there are seminal events that took place
in Louisiana—it was the state where the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson was
filed, and where six-year-old Ruby Bridges helped
to desegregate the New Orleans public schools
as a first-grader in 1960—most of the photographic record of the African American civil rights
struggle focuses on places such as Alabama and
Mississippi. These photographs, she wrote in her
application for the JWJI fellowship, “analyze how
African Americans represented and positioned
themselves as key actors to end racial discrimination in Louisiana.”
best manuscript and archives collections.” As
proof, she was able to finish in three months at
Emory an article that she had worked on since
2009 in Louisiana and had trouble completing
due to a scarcity of scholarly resources.
Brown’s spring-semester class is full—25 students
will be learning about Black Power in Film and
History. They will examine films that debuted
between 1968 and 1974 and had an overt or
covert ideology that represented key themes of the
black power movement—racial uplift and pride,
autonomy from the majority culture, and a burgeoning sense of advancement in wider society.
Brown is the second member of her family to
hold a JWJI fellowship. Her older brother, Scot
Brown, who is now a faculty member at UCLA,
held a fellowship in 2013–2014. “I knew that
Emory had the resources—and I don’t mean just
money,” she says, to make the JWJI fellowship
an attractive option for pursuing her research.
“Emory has one of the best libraries that I’ve
been in—and I went to Yale. It has one of the
Brown’s exuberance and love of learning come
through during the most cursory discussion with
her, and her academic interests are expansive.
Earlier scholarship looked at black women in the
years before and after World War I. She initially
thought she’d find these women “very poor and
very uneducated, meaning they were lucky if they
5
The
James Weldon Johnson Institute
Biography of Nikki Brown
Brown is an associate professor of history at
the University of New Orleans. She majored in
history at Oberlin College and earned a PhD
in history from Yale University in 2001. Her
book, Private Politics and Public Voices: Black
Women’s Activism from World War I to the New
Deal won the Letitia Woods Brown Award for
Best Book in African American Women’s History
in 2006. The major themes in Brown’s work are
gender, race, identity, representation, and politics.
Brown is also a professional photographer and
recently has completed a photography project
on African American men in New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina.
got three years of education living in rural areas
in the Southern states.” Instead, she found a group
of women very cognizant of what was going on in
the world around them.
Another avenue of research unexpectedly cropped
up when a friend encouraged Brown to travel to
Turkey. It took her more than a decade to do so,
but she eventually applied for a Fulbright grant
to teach US history there. In Turkey, she met a
black State Department employee who, during a
lunch together, told Brown about the country’s
Afro-Turk population. Brown had thought that
they were recent immigrants from the African continent, but her lunch companion explained that,
no, these Turks were descendants of the Ottoman
Empire’s slave trade, which once extended from
Eastern Europe to East Africa.
“Their stories and heritage are not unlike African
Americans,” says Brown. “Many of these folks
live in poverty but they survive despite the lack
of resources.” She estimates that about one million Africans were enslaved in Turkey, with most
eventually blending into the country’s dominant
culture. However, about 20,000 currently live
as a minority community within Turkey. Brown
intends to pick up her lens once again to take
photos and conduct interviews of the Afro-Turks,
learning Turkish—a notoriously difficult written
language for native English speakers—in
the process.
Right now, she’s enthusiastic to be at Emory.
“Getting up and going to this library and talking
to the great community of scholars, I come at this
fellowship with genuine excitement,” Brown says.
“Being here makes the ideas just come out better.
I am a better scholar here.”
6
for the
Study of Race and Difference
Picking Winners and Losers in the US Criminal Justice System
by Stacey Jones
The more things change, the more they stay
the same.
To many, the names Oscar Grant, Michael Brown,
Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Darnisha Harris,
and others are the most recent manifestations of
a sometimes-deadly double standard regarding
criminality and black youth. For others, these
young people are the unfortunate victims of rogue
police officers—not a criminal justice system that
is predisposed to stack the deck against minority
youths. Carl Suddler, a historian who writes about
race and crime from the 1930s to the 1960s,
might argue that the adage gets it right at least in
this aspect—the American criminal justice system
has rarely been color-blind when it comes to crime
and punishment.
“I write about young people. And even the term
youth changes over time,” he says. In the period
he covers in his research, “we see a shift in how
young people are treated in the criminal justice
system,” says Suddler. “There’s a shift from progressive to more punitive politics during this time,
and I write about this transition, at least as it pertains to legal proceedings and how we approach
juvenile delinquency.”
White youths are granted the privilege of being
younger longer,” he says. That’s not always the
case, Suddler emphasizes, but “historical records
have shown they have been often able to avoid
criminal responsibility in a way that nonwhite
youth have not.”
He became interested in the topic of race and
crime in high school, after long conversations with
his history teacher, who challenged him to look
beyond conventional wisdom about people and
events—an often one-sided view. “I didn’t know
there were fancy words like criminalization when
I started thinking about this,” he says, likening his
scholarly interests to “writing a history of people
from the other side.”
A recent PhD graduate from Indiana University
in Bloomington, Suddler is in the process of turning his dissertation into a manuscript tentatively
titled Young Forever: The Criminalization of
Urban Youth, 1939–1964. ““When considering
constructions of criminality, youth is a privilege.
As an example, Suddler cites two white teenagers who, after World War II, get into a fight with
recently returned sailors. One of the young men,
Charles Vejvoda uses brass knuckles against the
sailors, and both are arrested. In this case, the
teenager claimed to be carrying the brass knuckles
for protection; their fathers referred to the police
as overzealous. The youth who did not use the
brass knuckles had his case dismissed for “just
accompanying” his friend, Suddler says.
7
The
James Weldon Johnson Institute
Biography of Carl Suddler
Carl Suddler earned his PhD in history from
Indiana University. His research interests focus
on constructions of youth, race, and crime in the
20th-century United States. Specifically, Suddler
explores how the justice systems and their associated authorities contributed to racialized constructions of youth criminality, primarily in the
urban North.
Contrast their case to the Harlem Six—a group of
black youth who were all jailed for the 1964 murder of a white woman, a Harlem shopkeeper who
was killed “by one thrust of a knife.” All six were
under the age of 18 when they were sentenced
and, predating the now-common practice of sentencing juveniles as adults, served prison terms
ranging from nine to 21 years. “For as long as
we’ve thought about it—at least from the 1930s
forward—there has been adult time for adult
crimes for youth of color,” says Suddler.
Suddler will include aspects of crime and punishment in his spring semester survey course,
20th-Century African American Urban History.
“A little bit of everything” will be thrown into
the course, he says, which also will consider cities regionally—New York City, Chicago, New
Orleans, and urban areas in California. He won’t
dwell only in the past, however; he’s including a
decidedly 21st-century feature in the class, arranging for several authors on the syllabus to speak
to his students via Skype. “They’re not all history
majors, so a big thing for me is that I want them
to walk away with something tangible from the
course,” Suddler says. “Feeling like they’ve left
a stronger writer and a stronger reader, both of
which will translate later, regardless of what they
decide to do after this class.”
The JWJI fellowship is Suddler’s first job after
being granted his doctorate. Growing up in an
army family, Suddler moved around a lot. His
parents ultimately settled in Delaware, where
he attended high school and the University of
Delaware, double-majoring in history and black
American studies. Coming to Emory has been his
first visit to the Deep South. He likes Atlanta.
“It’s been a welcome surprise.”
Suddler’s teaching interests include 20th-century
African American history; 20th-century US history;
urban US history; history of crime and punishment;
postwar history of youth, race, and crime.
8
for the
Study of Race and Difference
Public Dialogue Series on Race and Public Memory
“Confederate Heritage and Black History
in Tension”
Part of the JWJI’s Public Dialogue Series on Race
and Public Memory
insistence on flying the Confederate battle flag on
state capital grounds. Other Southern states were
also forced to take stock of the many Confederate
memorials in their midst. Why this particular time
and not the many others that African Americans
and others had protested these symbols? “Perhaps
this time they were embarrassed and ashamed?”
posits Leslie Harris, Emory associate professor
of history.
February 25, 2016, 4:00 to 5:30 p.m.
Oxford Road Building Auditorium,
1390 Oxford Road, Atlanta
For more information or to register:
http://jamesweldonjohnson.emory.edu
“I have two fears about this response,” she says.
“One is that it reinforces the idea that African
American deaths, rather than African American
reasoned arguments, are what can lead to change
around issues of racism. Second, the erasure of
these symbols will not lead to the erasure of racism. However, it can lead to the erasure of history.
When we react so immediately to drop something,
we often drop everything—both the offensive
thing and the need to thoughtfully remember why
it is so troubling.”
Is Confederate memorabilia emblematic of pride
or prejudice? The Confederacy ended more than
150 years ago, yet its symbols and seminal figures
continue to exert a strong influence for some,
even outside the South. For others, these Civil War
symbols represent the terror and hate of the post–
Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras up to modern
times. Confederate Heritage and Black History
in Tension, a symposium presented by the James
Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race
and Difference, will feature a panel of five scholars examining the seemingly disparate yet intertwined connections among black history, Southern
history, and the politics of commemoration.
The symposium will consider the following questions: Do symbols of the Confederacy honor
heritage or promote racial hatred? What is the
relationship between Confederate heritage and
African American history? How should the
Confederacy be remembered? Along with Harris
and Roark, panelists will include Catherine
Clinton, president of the Southern Historical
Association; Maurice J. Hobson, assistant professor of history at Georgia State and vice president
for membership of the Association for the Study
of African American Life and History (Atlanta
Branch); and Emory faculty member Joseph
Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History.
“We often hear that wars don’t settle anything,”
says James Roark, Samuel Candler Dobbs
Professor of History at Emory and one of the panelists. “In fact, the US Civil War settled two enormous issues: slavery (abolished) and the nature of
the Union (permanent and indivisible).” But settling those issues created additional ones:
“Left unsettled were the rights of African
Americans as free people and the place of the
South in the federal system.” Roark notes,
“Those issues—race and federalism—are as alive
today as they were in 1865.”
That became apparent last summer in South
Carolina, when nine black churchgoers were
murdered by a white man who had posted online
pictures posing with symbols of the Confederacy
and apartheid. In the aftermath of the Emanuel
AME killings, the state of South Carolina was
held to task across the nation for its continuing
9
The
James Weldon Johnson Institute
Stanley Thangaraj: A Player Both on the Court and in the Halls of Academe
by Susan Carini
Had Stanley Thangaraj proposed some pickup
basketball following the inaugural lecture of the
Race and Difference Colloquium Series, audience
members might have learned even more from
this former Emory student-athlete, now assistant
professor of anthropology in the Colin Powell
School for Civic and Global Leadership at the
City College of New York. As it was, they learned
a great deal without breaking a sweat.
The lecture, “South Asian American Sporting
Cultures: Performing Identity with and against
the Black-White Racial Logic,” set exactly the
right tone for this ambitious series, which is now
weekly and features local and national speakers
presenting academic research on contemporary
questions of race and intersecting dimensions of
difference. It also was the perfect homecoming for
Thangaraj, who felt honored to be asked into a
conversation that perhaps can contribute to making his alma mater, as he describes it, “a site of
citizenship on equal terms.”
James Weldon Johnson Institute (JWJI) Director
Andra Gillespie explains the intent behind the
change she made to the series. In her words,
“When we relaunched the institute, it was important to expand the colloquium series to a weekly
gathering. I wanted to create a campus culture
where there was a frequent outlet for people to
engage in deep, intellectual discussions about race
and difference. Weekly colloquia allow us to invite
a wider array of speakers, whose research covers
a greater range of subjects and a broader spectrum of racial and ethnic minority groups. I want
attendees to leave the colloquium series cognizant
of the vibrancy and importance of the intellectual
questions that scholars of race and ethnicity bring
to the academy.”
engaging speaker, but his work is so counter-stereotypical. That’s what we hope to do at JWJI:
provide a platform for scholars doing interesting
work about race to challenge us to consider the
conventional and unexpected ways that social
constructions of race and culture affect even the
most mundane aspects of our lives.”
The respect flows both ways because Thangaraj
is excited about the new leadership of the institute. “At this historical moment,” he says, “with
increased violence against certain communities,
there is no better embodiment of what scholarship can do than what Drs. Gillespie and JWJI
Assistant Director Kali-Ahset Amen, along with
“Stan’s talk in particular was amazing for so
many reasons,” Gillespie says. “Not only is he an
10
for the
Study of Race and Difference
the visiting scholars, are doing at JWJI. They are
bringing in a more expansive definition of race
that includes gender and class. By doing that, we
have the ability to talk about violence in all its
ways and also to rethink how we collaborate and
build coalitions that respond to violence.”
belonging within South Asian America in particular and the US in general.” His newest coedited
collection, Asian American Sporting Cultures,
will be out in April 2016.
Readers of Desi Hoop Dreams will note that
part of its astonishing originality is how it construes what “brown” means. At one point, in fact,
Thangaraj planned for it to be titled Brown Out.
Man Up! Basketball, Leisure, and Making South
Asian American Masculinity. Says Thangaraj,
“Within the racial logic of the US, ‘brown’ was a
much more productive term for me.” As he notes,
especially in the South, discussion of black and
white drowns out all else. But black and white
“have needed the other to make sense of themselves. By looking at these other communities, we
can show the differential aftermath of racial policies on citizenship.”
Thangaraj’s work puts him squarely in the middle of discussions about classic gendered stereotypes about Asian Americans. For instance, one
persistent stereotype for South Asian males is
that their athletic participation, when they manifest it at all, is limited to cricket. Film series such
as Harold & Kumar and National Lampoon
have helped to create an image of South Asian
men as some combination of “nerd, model
minority, or hyposexual,” he says. “All serve in
various ways to emasculate.”
As he grew up, Thangaraj—who was born in
India and lived there until age 14, when his father
joined the faculty of Candler School of Theology
in 1988—did not conform to the media type of
the South Asian male. On the contrary, he was
a serious, committed athlete and, later, coach
in both volleyball and basketball. Besides, as
he laughingly confesses, “in trying to play high
school baseball in the US, I discovered that cricket
and baseball are not the same.”
Although he intentionally tried to limit its academic language, Desi Hoop Dreams is a scholarly
study of the first order, as its numerous award
nominations indicate. The book is up for the
Asian American Studies Social Science Award,
the Asian American Studies Popular Culture
Award, the American Anthropological Society’s
Bateson Prize for Best Ethnography, the North
American Society for the Sociology of Sport Best
Sports Book of the Year, and the American Studies
Association’s John Hope Franklin Book Award.
Thangaraj acknowledges the challenging style,
saying, “My book is its own mess in itself, right?
It is talking about things from everyday life, like
pickup basketball, but using academic jargon. It
was a tough thing to balance. I tried to let the stories speak for themselves.”
He realized that stories he had been gathering as
both a player and coach since 1994—stories of
both belonging and exclusion—could be put into
the service of some eye-opening experiential ethnography. In journal articles since 2010, he lit up
the previously closed worlds of, as it is known,
‘Indo-Pak’ basketball. In 2014 he coedited the collection Sport and South Asian Diasporas: Playing
through Space and Time. In June 2015 came Desi
Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making
of Asian American Masculinity. One rich reward
of the book is that it “analyzes the dilemma of
It is precisely those stories to which the James
Weldon Johnson Institute hopes to give voice
through its colloquium series.
11
The
James Weldon Johnson Institute
Spring Semester Calendar
Major Programs
February 9, 6:00 p.m.
Carlos Museum Reception Hall
Launch Reception
An evening celebration to introduce the Johnson Institute’s new vision, leadership,
and fellows to the Emory community.
February 25, 4:00 p.m.
Southern History and Black History Symposium
A dialogue among historians exploring the contentious connections between
Confederate heritage and African American history.
April 14, 4:00 p.m.
James Weldon Johnson Annual Lecture
Annual address by a distinguished race scholar and public intellectual. This year’s
speaker is Aldon Morris, Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and
African American
Studies at Northwestern University.
Colloquium Series
February 1
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Jonathan Xavier Inda
Professor and chair of Latino/Latina Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana–
Champagne
“Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life”
February 8
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Leslie Bow
Mark and Elizabeth Eccles Professor of English and Asian American Studies,
University of Wisconsin–Madison
“Racial Caricature, the Anthropomorphic Object, and the Culture of Cute”
February 15
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Allyson Hobbs
Assistant professor of history, Stanford University
“A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life”
12
for the
Study of Race and Difference
February 22
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Stacey Sinclair
Associate professor of psychology, Princeton University
“You Are Who You Know: How Ethnic Attitudes and Interpersonal Interactions
Shape One Another”
February 25
4:00–5:30 p.m.
Public Dialogues in Race and Difference
Southern History and Black History Symposium
Panelists: Catherine Clinton, Joseph Crespino, Leslie M. Harris, and
James L. Roark
February 29
12:00–1:30 p.m.
K. Juree Capers
Assistant professor of public management and policy, Georgia State University
“Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Exploring the Role of School
Desegregation and Representation in the Discipline Gap”
March 14
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Dania Francis
Assistant professor of economics and African American studies, University of
Massachusetts–Amherst
“Why Don’t More Black Students Take AP Math? Racialized Tracking, Social
Isolation, and the ‘Acting White’ Hypothesis”
March 21
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Muniba Saleem
Assistant professor of communication studies, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
“Representations of Muslims in American Media”
March 28
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Nikki Brown
JWJI Visiting Scholar
“Pictures of a Demonstration: The Congress of Racial Equality and Desegregation
Activism in New Orleans, 1960 to 1964”
13
The
James Weldon Johnson Institute
April 4
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Carl Suddler
Visiting fellow
“The Color of Justice without Prejudice: Youth, Race, and Crime in the Case of the
Harlem Six”
April 11
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Michelle Y. Gordon
Visiting fellow
“Chicago’s Black Arts Movement”
April 18
12:00–1:30 p.m.
Naomi Murakawa
Associate Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University
“The Perils of Policing Reform”
14